


Cookbook

by pinetreelady



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek Cooks, Domestic, Future Fic, Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 15:12:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1715114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinetreelady/pseuds/pinetreelady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek finds a long-lost cookbook.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cookbook

**Author's Note:**

> One day [elisera](http://elisera.tumblr.com/) asked me what I was making for dinner. The dish I was making had a backstory as to how I'd found the recipe, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it had potential as a Stiles/Derek story. 
> 
> As always, elisera gets many thanks as co-conspirator, enabler, and pre-reader extraordinaire. And ... sorry, bb, for answering your simple question weeks later and with a thousand words of fanfic.

When Derek was a kid, his cousin Kelly up and decided to become a vegetarian. Which ... they’re werewolves. It’s like a cattle rancher’s kid announcing they won’t eat meat anymore. A perfect rebellion that none of the Hales were equipped to cope with. But no amount of discussion had changed Kelly’s mind; she was adamant, and eventually they realized they’d have to adapt, as families do.

Peter, who cooked most of their meals, rose to the challenge, found some recipes -- casseroles, stews, hearty salads and side dishes -- that would provide balanced nutrition for their insistent vegetarian, but would also satisfy the carnivorous majority. One dish, with beans and chiles and macaroni, became well-loved by all the Hales, and Derek’s favorite in particular. After the fire, though, he forgot about it. It was just a tiny piece of an enormous, all-encompassing loss.

~*~

When Laura took him to New York after the fire, things were bad. Bleak. Food meant sustenance, nothing more. For months they lived on convenience foods and take-out, consumed silently in front of the TV. Their first Christmas alone together, though, Laura surprised him by producing the recipe and making his favorite dish, for his birthday, in memoriam.

It turned out that when Laura went to New York for college, she’d called Peter one day, asking him to read the recipe over the phone. She’d scrawled it onto yellow legal paper, thanking him and saying she knew it would be a hit at the departmental potluck she was heading to.

They ate it at the table, not slouched on the couch, and used extra napkins to wipe their eyes. It was good, healing in more ways than one. Derek couldn’t find words to thank her, but in the new year, he started shopping for groceries again, looking up recipes on the internet, slowly teaching himself how to cook. They branched out from things they’d remembered. That humble dish, though, seemed sacred. They saved it for special occasions, and Laura was always the one who made it. Derek wasn’t even sure of all the ingredients.

Losing the recipe again hurt almost as much as losing his sister. He never found it in Laura’s papers, cleaning out their New York apartment in a haze of grief. Thinking back, he figured he’d probably thrown it away himself as he emptied her desk. 

He still remembered the recipe with bittersweet fondness, but he didn’t crave it. He just clung to a good memory, now doubly overlaid with loss.

~*~

Gradually, as things settled down in Beacon Hills, Derek took up cooking again. As they’d done in New York, he deliberately sought out new recipes, browsing the internet, using cookbooks from the library -- baked macaroni and cheese, shrimp scampi, sausage jambalaya -- and made them again and again. Until making food for the pack, the people he cared about, started to feel natural again. 

~*~

In Stiles’ senior year at Berkeley, Derek visited him with increasing frequency. They were still tentative, moving glacially slow. They spent a lazy afternoon wandering around used bookstores, Derek in the probably life-long process of carefully replacing books whose covers he recognized from before the fire, Lord of the Rings or Anne of Green Gables or even his mom’s collection of knitting books, his dad’s his books on ancient Greece. Even the occasional cookbook, from the pack’s well-stocked kitchen shelves. On this quiet day with Stiles, crouched down by the cookbooks, he got lucky. Derek swallowed hard, throat tight, when his eyes fell on the unassuming little paperback, jammed between bigger, glossier books, and he realized what he’d found at last. He paged through it slowly, and there was the recipe of his childhood, that favorite they’d all grown to love, the one Laura had made for them years ago in New York. Finally, he could make it himself.

He and Stiles wandered down the block with their haul, and sat on a bench in the shade. Stiles glanced curiously at the inconspicuous little $7 book in Derek’s hand. “So, what did you find?” he asked. Derek pushed it at him, unable to speak. He could tell that Stiles was reining in his incredulity that a werewolf could be so moved by a book of vegetarian recipes. Stiles blinked, eyebrows raised, but flipped through the pages obligingly. Fixing his eyes on Stiles’ hands, Derek managed to explain, haltingly, why it mattered. About Kelly, and Laura. And Stiles, perceptive as always, pressed up against his side, smelling a little wistful, saying, “I get it, dude. I do.”

That night, eating ice cream in the park after pho for dinner, Stiles shared stories of his own about food and comfort and childhood. He described his mom’s recipes -- spanakopita, beef stew, scalloped potatoes, glazed carrots -- and how after years of trying, he still couldn’t replicate them in a way that lived up to his memories. Her pumpkin pie recipe that originated with John’s mother -- that had been his very favorite. Stiles looked away, unfocused, and said there was so much memory tied up in the taste that he suspects he’s asking too much of a recipe, of food, in expecting it to replace something that’s ineffable, irrecoverable, and not really about food at all.

Derek appreciated what Stiles was doing -- prepping him not to be disappointed, not to build it up too much. But the next time they made plans, two weeks later, Derek announced that he’d make his special recipe for Stiles. He insisted on soaking and slow-cooking the beans, spending more for the extra-sharp cheddar the Hales had favored, buying the proper variety of dried chiles and both red and green bell peppers. They went to three stores in search of precisely the right ribbed macaroni that would hold the sauce just so.

Once Derek pulled it from the oven, smelling perfect, he dished it up into the earthenware bowls Lydia had handed down to Stiles last year. Stiles doused it with his favorite hot sauce and proclaimed it was his new favorite thing. Afterward, he kissed Derek soft and slow against the sink until they were breathless, until they forgot about food altogether.

~*~

A year later, Stiles and Derek live together, and Derek still makes their favorite regularly. Stiles invariably scrapes the last bits out of the pan, reheats the leftovers for lunch the next day, carefully divvies up the last few bites. They make it for John, too; it has cheese in it, sure, but not a lot. It’s heart-healthy. And Derek, now that he has the book in hand, remembers other dishes his family had made, failures and successes and other favorites he’d forgotten. He and Stiles make them all, and then they tackle Stiles’ mom’s recipes, too, trying again and again to get them just right. Stiles tells Derek he has a magic touch, because he thinks they’re getting pretty darn close.


End file.
